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拍品专文
Magnificent and imposing on a grand scale, with a luscious, palpable texture, Black Car by Chinese contemporary artist Li Songsong is a monumental diptych, richly layered with dense pastel hues of sea foam green, soft yellow and powder blue interspersed amongst alabaster whites and creamy greys. Executed in 2005, Black Car is one of the artist's masterpiece paintings from early in his career, presenting a stately procession of black cars, moving in almost ritualistic fashion through Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Behind the procession stand a hoard of people, their facial expressions made undistinguishable by the dramatic, thick swathes of paint enveloping the canvas. Bordering on abstraction, Li derives his subjects from source material that can be readily found in newspapers, old magazines, films and other forms of mass media, choosing images that are both easily recognisable by any Chinese person and loaded with cultural significance, whether it is a scene of staunch political power or an image of quotidian life. However, Li's conscious decision to render this ideologically-charged source material in his distinctly painterly, neutral, objective manner, frees the works from any previous associations, negative or positive.
The extraordinary physicality of Li's technique is apparent in Black Car. He has created a paint surface that is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, the softly blurred photorealist paintings and the squeegee-wielded abstractions, in this case put together in a single work. Equally, Li has a similar relationship to history as Richter, using the push-pull of the paint to come to terms with a chequered history and simultaneously to interrogate the impact of past events on his psyche. Li deconstructs his subject, fracturing the image into independent blocks of thick impasto, with each layer of paint gouged and carved out of the picture plane as if sculpted into being. It is Li's unique, methodical use of small, rectangular panels to construct his paintings that makes the final image so compelling. Working with each panel individually, he completes one before moving onto the next, assembling each piece as if fitting together a puzzle in his reconstruction of the image. Li's use of different colours and opposing directions of brushwork for adjacent panels further reinforces the individuality of each one and simultaneously dismantles the cohesiveness of the original source image.
With the inclusion of the pagoda-like roof of the main gate into the Forbidden City in the background, Li overtly references the concept of political authority. The Forbidden City, once the home of the emperor and centre of dynastic rule, however, is no longer a symbol of Imperial power. In modern China, it is the home of Mao Zedong's 'standard portrait' as he watches over all of the country, appearing next to the widely disseminated slogan 'Ten Thousand Year Life of the People's Republic of China, Ten Thousand Year Life of the Great Unity of the People of the World'. In Black Car, these details appear unintelligible, almost illegible, as if the artist is silencing their significance in the painting and in history. Though Black Car appears inherently imbued with the turbulence and ideological fervor of China's recent past, Li does not confront or steer the viewer to any one conclusion. Instead, he invites you to gaze into the composition in a detached manner, to experience his working practice and to allow associations to rise up from the painterly smokescreen.
The extraordinary physicality of Li's technique is apparent in Black Car. He has created a paint surface that is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, the softly blurred photorealist paintings and the squeegee-wielded abstractions, in this case put together in a single work. Equally, Li has a similar relationship to history as Richter, using the push-pull of the paint to come to terms with a chequered history and simultaneously to interrogate the impact of past events on his psyche. Li deconstructs his subject, fracturing the image into independent blocks of thick impasto, with each layer of paint gouged and carved out of the picture plane as if sculpted into being. It is Li's unique, methodical use of small, rectangular panels to construct his paintings that makes the final image so compelling. Working with each panel individually, he completes one before moving onto the next, assembling each piece as if fitting together a puzzle in his reconstruction of the image. Li's use of different colours and opposing directions of brushwork for adjacent panels further reinforces the individuality of each one and simultaneously dismantles the cohesiveness of the original source image.
With the inclusion of the pagoda-like roof of the main gate into the Forbidden City in the background, Li overtly references the concept of political authority. The Forbidden City, once the home of the emperor and centre of dynastic rule, however, is no longer a symbol of Imperial power. In modern China, it is the home of Mao Zedong's 'standard portrait' as he watches over all of the country, appearing next to the widely disseminated slogan 'Ten Thousand Year Life of the People's Republic of China, Ten Thousand Year Life of the Great Unity of the People of the World'. In Black Car, these details appear unintelligible, almost illegible, as if the artist is silencing their significance in the painting and in history. Though Black Car appears inherently imbued with the turbulence and ideological fervor of China's recent past, Li does not confront or steer the viewer to any one conclusion. Instead, he invites you to gaze into the composition in a detached manner, to experience his working practice and to allow associations to rise up from the painterly smokescreen.